I started teaching in 1970, young, miniskirted, longhair, avant garde even.  I was the new wave for education or so I thought.  Now in 2008 I am often one of the oldest teachers in the building and many my age have already retired.

I am still however the little girl who has silly little routines, the naïve optimist, the one who cries at happy endings and the person in the mirror is not really who I feel I am.

It’s odd that way.  Lately my hair is just starting to turn grey and I have decided to let it, foregoing the blonde hair dye that was  a staple for years. 

My friend, a fellow career sub told me once that she found the job got a bit easier once she looked a little older. Kids have a different category for older teachers, maybe a ‘don’t mess with her’ attitude. It may be respect but it may just be practical. A teacher that old has probably seen a bunch of the tricks and is wise to them.

Most of the time I don’t even think of  my age. I am thinking of the kids and what I can do to make this lesson interesting. The strategy usually is ‘meet them where they are’, to try to relate this material to their current interests and life. For that I do have to know their current life and I have to keep abreast of what toys the little ones are playing with, what songs and artists the teens like lately, what movies and TV shows are influencing them and what  news events in the world are affecting them.  I have to watch how they dress and how they speak and I certainly don’t want to imitate those- that is their territory- but I need to be aware of what matters to them.  This becomes harder and harder the older I get though since I don’t really have much outside of school contact with the wide range of ages any more.  When my own kids were growing up I was very intensely exposed to the interests of each age group as they moved through, but now that they are adult, I have to make a conscious effort to walk through the toy stores, to watch the ads, to listen carefully to the chat, to know what’s going on for kids today.

I also am aware that I am getting older by looking at the teachers, the new young crop each generation, often now teachers younger than my own children and something in me is very enthused to see how keen they are. And something in me is a little sad too, to know that a young teacher, fresh out of university, is paid more than I am, because subs are paid below grid.  I try not to be bitter but there is an unfairness there that must be eventually addressed.

It amuses me to see the flow of time, and to more and more think of my role in it, from nervous little student to young overconfident teacher, to worried parent and now to older teacher, coming in and out of the ‘system’ at various times.  Am I wiser for this? Yes I think it has been useful.  Now when I see a parent distraught that her child is crying and won’t go into the classroom, when I see a dad beaming that his child is running toward him after class, I understand.

The steep steps of the older schools seem steeper now. I look forward to sitting down in nonteaching moments and sometimes, at storytime- even while I teach.  I watch more and talk less because so much of what I see could be interpreted several ways. It takes a long time to know what would be the best way to handle a rebellious teen and the older I get the more options I can think of before I act.

Part of being older is negative. I am maybe too suspicious. If the essay is particularly good by a student whose marks are low, I am aware of a time when two kids swapped papers and I remember it.  I am on my guard, maybe too much, when a kid wants to pose to me a skill-testing trick question, who wants me to just pull on this paper, just push this button.  I have seen a lot of ways kids can cheat on tests and if the child idly leaves a paper very visibly exposed to neighbors, I am maybe too suspicious of motives. One time when a student was using a breath spray that smelled a lot like alcohol I was very concerned that she had spiked it somehow.

Sometimes I have to keep myself from prejudging.  Now that I have seen thousands of kids at every age I see this little grade 5 boy in front of me the class clown pushing the limits and stealing and bullying others, and I fast-forward to the teen thief he may well become. I look at the little grade 7 girl with the heavy eye make up, the short skirt and long necklace, who is flirting with the boys seductively and ignoring school work and I can’t help but imagine her in about three years on the street or dropping out and troubled. Yet I can’t think that way. I have to see the windows that make bad outcomes avoidable, and I have to see the potential for good in all the kids.  The one heckling me or mocking may be a defiant egotist or may be a brilliant debater restless to have his ideas addressed. I have to try to understand.

Sometimes I get inklings of my age. The other day I had a  grade 11 student with a very unusual last name. I asked if her dad was Doug and she looked at me shocked and said yes. I said I think I taught him when he was in high school and she looked absolutely amazed and kind of revolted like she had discovered her dad wore monogrammed underwear.  I guess she did not really think that he had had a childhood per se.

One time the child’s last name was familiar and it turned out I had taught her parent also, but that he was now dead. It was a very sad revelation.

I ‘ve noticed too that the effect I have on young teachers is odd. I go into a room worrying that I may not be good enough and wondering if they are going to treat me as lesser but it turns out that the young teacher often is insecure when I’m there and trying to prove themselves to me. I noticed this by their adamant bravado, their insistence on showing how well they discipline, their strong attempts to show their ‘coolness’ to the kids. One time when the teacher I was subbing for was there but was off to a meeting, she had left some vague lesson plans and I told her that if there was an empty spot I could fill it with some activities I always had on hand. She said” Well I know you could but I want to”. She wanted ownership and deserves it but I realized she actually had no trouble believing I was competent. Her issue was to prove she was. This was one hundred per cen the opposite of what I had assumed – that I was being evaluated. 

And so I have realized my role as a senior teacher is often to encourage and cheer on others, since this is no longer about me but about them, about their careers and trying to make them feel good about the role.  And I do see a lot of good stuff and try to praise it.

Now that I am nearly 60 though, I get flashes of what I must appear to the kids. The littlest ones say odd things “Whose mother or grandma are you?” “You look like my grandma”

One time I was at a school where a teacher was just about to retire and I told her that she had been a student teacher when I was in high school. I remembered her and she of course did not remember me but there I saw that she had gone on to teach for about 40 years and here it was ending.  Her entire career had spanned much of my life.

A relative of mine was a career teacher, married but with no children and she taught students, then their children, then their grandchildren in her small town.  I guess this is the norm.

Another relative of mine when her kids were teens, returned to university and became a teacher and she started her career there about the same year I took time away to be home with my kids She taught many many years, then retired, about the same time I started up again.  I had given her much of my teaching material and now I suppose she could have done the hand-off back. 

I don’t even try to look young. That would insult the kids and even myself. I am not ashamed of my age.  One day we were to discuss meanings of common proverbs and the one came up “Clothes don’t make the  man”. I asked the grade 3s if I dressed up as them woiuld that suddenly make me cool? Their answer immediately was a resounding ‘No!’

The slang of kids changes every year of two and I can’t hope to keep up. In fact I think that they intentionally create this sublanguage in order to shock adults and escape adults’ complete understanding of them. A few years ago I sat in a classroom and jotted down some of the chat I was hearing so maybe later I could even reflect on it or look it up. They were talking of chugging drinks, being psycho killer busy, one said that popcorn rocks and of course everything under creation was ‘awesome’.  Sometimes I hear teachers using a few of these expressions and it strikes me as pushing the limits of logic. “If you did this assignment, that would be awesome”, “If you hand in your paper on the way out that would be awesome”. We have somehow degraded awe but hey, who am I to talk?

When I was first teaching a very shy grade 9 boy came up to me and asked if I had been swimming last weekend at his pool. I had not but I had visions of him watching from afar as some lithe beautiful woman, such as myself, ha ha, was diving.  Nowadays I am not mistaken for that. Students have told me I look just like another teacher they know or just like their mom’s sister.

I realize how old I am when the class is discussing some pop artists and the topic of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis comes up, or Janis Joplin or the Doors and of course they have never heard of them or only from their grandparents’ generation. These kids are not even aware of who Princess Diana was and for them she has always been dead.  It is tricky to find the common ground to talk about.  Some of the littlest kids I teacher were born in 2003. . I mean how very young that is!  I have clothes I’ve been wearing regularly that are older than that.

I am reminded how old I am when my first instinct is to sing the words to O Canada using the old lyrics not the new ones though the new ones probably were introd


When I am in some of the oldest high schools I notice pictures on the wall of that crop of grade 12 grads and they are, from the 1940s, taught by teachers I had. From the 1960s they are people I knew from university. From the 1970s they are people I taught five years earlier when they were in junior high. And from the 1990s they are colleagues of my own children who went to this high school instead of the one my kids went to.  So many memories and the oddity is that all these kids photographed are about 18 years old anyway.   I love to admire the way they grew actually, to see how the young child at 12 became a very respectable young man at 18, how the little girl became a quite attractive young adult.  You can’t help but admire nature’s artistry.

Sometimes being the age I am gives me a kind of advantage to how the kids relate to me because they assume I know and care about personal things for their wellbeing. Little kids will say to me “I got a new shirt”, or “I just changed because I don’t want to wear that” or “My tooth is loose” or “Do I need a coat to go out for recess?”  I am sure they comment to any teacher about those things but they seem very open to telling me, maybe because I look grandmotherly.  I am sometimes amazed at a kindergarten child who having had me as a teacher only 3 hours hugs me as she leaves.  Of course it is not me she is hugging per se, but she is hugging the image of someone friendly at school and she is probably from an environment at home of just assured love.  It is touching and oddly it makes me feel very protective for these kids and of their innocence.  I do  not think they should hug strangers and I would warm them against it.  But they apparently think of ‘teacher’ as not  a stranger and that’s OK.

The grade 8s want to listen to music as they work and I say they can only listen to French radio since this is a French class. They balk because they’d prefer to listen to rock music. One boy suggests a compromise, an English ‘oldies’ station, for me.